THE former mayor of Bogota focused on developing his city for the majority of people - the lower income group. He established open public spaces and prioritised public transport.
Neil Fraser
June 20, 2005
Rand Club fire
ALTHOUGH it could clearly have been much worse - the structure of the building appears to have not been badly affected - the fire damage to the Rand Club on Wednesday night, 15 June was tragic in terms of the loss to the city of some of its historic artifacts and its magnificent interior.
We have retained so little of our built heritage and now more of its memories will be lost to future generations. Maybe the authorities will be shocked into some action. I am glad to see a positive reaction from the club, which is determined to get it back on its feet as quickly as possible.
Places and spaces 4
"The least a democratic society should do is to offer people wonderful public spaces."
Last week I referred to the dynamic former mayor of Bogota, Enrique Penalosa, who was the keynote speaker at the Urban Life conference I attended in Sweden a few weeks ago. It was such a great privilege to listen to this leader of a third world city talk about what essentially is the democratisation of cities.
It made me realise that in many ways, while the democratisation of our country steadily progresses and becomes enriched almost daily, we may be losing the plot at the city level as we strive to achieve first world status. Here are some of the philosophies he applied during his term of office in Bogota (some of the following emanates from his keynote address, some from Cities of Joy, an interview with Penalosa by Jay Walljasper as published in Ode magazine, and reprinted in the Project for Public Spaces newsletter Making Places).
"If we in the Third World measure our success or failure as a society in terms of income, we would have to classify ourselves as losers until the end of time. With our limited resources, we have to invent other ways to measure success. This might mean that all kids have access to sports facilities, libraries, parks, schools, nurseries.
"In Bogota, our goal was to make a city for all the children. The measure of a good city is one where a child on a tricycle or bicycle can safely go anywhere. If a city is good for children, it will be good for everybody else. Over the last 80 years we have been making cities much more for cars' mobility than for children's happiness."
Human happiness
Penalosa clearly views cities as being planned for a specific purpose - to create human well-being - and that city leadership should promote human happiness.
"Economics, urban planning, ecology are only the means," he says. "Happiness is the goal. Places must make people happy." He points out that while income equality as a concept does not relate to market economy, we should be seeking to achieve quality-of-life equality, and that urban policy can be a powerful means to achieve equality in quality of life.
"The least a democratic society should do is to offer people wonderful public spaces. Public spaces are not a frivolity. They are just as important as hospitals and schools. They create a sense of belonging. This creates a different type of society - a society where people of all income levels meet in public space is a more integrated, socially healthier one.
"In Spanish we have this saying that it doesn't cost anything to dream. So I say let's play. Let's just imagine how you want your home to be. How you want your kids to live. Do you want to walk or drive to get bread? That's the basis of thinking about cities. We have not given enough thought to how we live. We have left too many of these decisions to others. Ninety-nine percent of third world people have never seen a Dutch or Danish city, where you see people on bikes everywhere. A city full of cars is not a good model for us.
"The images we get from the United States are a very damaging model to third world cities. We need to avoid undesirable developments such an urban sprawl. People in the US now recognise there are problems with building cities for cars and not for people, and we in the Third World need to know that. Pedestrians and bicyclists should be given as much importance as motor vehicles; even more so in developing country cities, where most households don't own cars."
Cars
It's not that Penalosa hates cars. It's that he loves lively public places where people of all backgrounds gather to enjoy themselves and each other - places that barely exist in cities where the car is king. These places are even more important in poor cities than in wealthy ones, he says, because poor people have nowhere else to go.
"We all need to see other people. We need to see green. Wealthy people can do that at clubs and private facilities. But most people can only do it in public squares, parks, libraries, sidewalks, greenways, public transit," he declares.
(Clearly the Tshwane City council did not consider any of these issues when it agreed to a hotel being built on one of its few remaining green inner city lungs last week.)
Penalosa is not just talk - these are the accomplishments of his administration in his three years in office (from 1998 to 2001):
- Creating the Trans-Milenio, a bus rapid transit system, that now carries half-a-million passengers daily on special bus lanes that offer most of the advantages of an underground at a fraction of the cost.
- Building 52 new schools, refurbishing 150 others, adding 14 000 computers to the public school system and increasing student enrollment by 34 percent.
- Establishing or refurbishing 1 200 parks and playgrounds throughout the city.
- Building three large and 10 neighbourhood libraries.
- Building 100 nursery schools for children under five, and finding permanent sources of funding.
- Improving life in the slums by bringing water to 100 percent of Bogota households, and buying undeveloped land on the outskirts of the city to prevent property speculation and to ensure it would be developed as affordable housing with electrical, sewage and telephone services as well as space reserved for parks, schools and greenways.
- Seeing the murder rate fall by two-thirds - this was almost all conventional crime; contrary to expectations, terrorist acts are rare in Bogota.
- Reclaiming the pavements from motorists, who traditionally saw them as either a passing lane or a parking lot. "I was almost impeached by the car-owning upper classes," Penalosa notes, "but it was popular with everyone else."
- Establishing 300 kilometres of separated bikeways, the largest network in the developing world.
- Creating the world's longest pedestrian street, 17 kilometres crossing much of the city, as well as a 45km greenway along a path that originally had been slated for an eight-lane highway.
- Reducing traffic by 40 percent with a system whereby motorists must leave cars at home during rush hour two days a week. He also raised parking fees and local petrol taxes, with half of the proceeds going to fund the new bus transit system.
- Inaugurating an annual car-free day, on which everyone from chief executives to janitors had to commute to work in some way other than a private car.
- Planting 100 000 trees.
Now that's a scorecard. Look carefully at each of those items and you will start to appreciate just what the democratisation of a city is all about.
Regards, Neil
PS: "... if Jozi was a woman we think she would be Nicole Fox, Thandiswa Mazwai, Kuli Roberts and Nkhensani Manganyi all rolled into one fast-paced, sexy, strong-willed, slightly dangerous, extremely glamorous, extraordinary girl."
That quote is from Chic Jozi - the Jo'burg Pocketbook by Nadine Rubin and Nikki Temkin. It is a fun booklet that provides all the latest info on Jozi's places from "top of the shops" to eating out, "caffeine fixes" to nightlife and décor to "chilling out" (and much, much more). Some of it, but not a huge amount, is relative to the inner city - but that will change over time.
